Star Bodies, Star Bios: Stardom, Gender, and Identity Politics Available to Purchase

This chapter examines The Karen Carpenter Story (1989), Superstar (1987), Meeting Two Queens (1991), Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), and Joan Sees Stars (1993) as star recyclings exploring through biography the relationship between stars as idealized embodiments of cultural ideals and the body as staging a performance of identity in capitalist, patriarchal culture. Since biography is invested in both history and storytelling, in narrating the self within a specific social milieu, the films and videos discussed in this chapter demonstrate how stars function as part of a culture’s “social imaginary.” Their thematic and formal concerns include the necessary substitution of another performing body for the body of the star subject in the dramatized biographical text, the conflicted terms of ownership of the star image, and the linkage of the normative star body to the ideological implications of the classical Hollywood film image and the narratives in which it is typically embedded.